Mears Group, the UK’s leading provider of domiciliary care and social housing repair and maintenance, has signed up as a principle sponsor of nationwide sustainability initiative, SHIFT.

Sustainable Homes Index For Tomorrow (SHIFT) is the only organisation to provide a comprehensive environmental benchmark for affordable housing providers, with members representing over one million homes in total.

David Miles, Mears Group Plc CEO, said:  “At Mears we are proud of the innovative approach we are taking to reduce our own environmental impacts, as well as working with local authorities to help create more sustainable social housing. Our work with SHIFT will enhance our activity in this area, which already includes a strategic partnership with British Gas to jointly address the challenges of energy efficiency within the social housing sector and our ‘Getting Greener’ Campaign developed to promote and raise awareness on climate change and carbon reduction.”

SHIFT provides superb sustainability training and the only solid environmental benchmarking system in the industry. We are very proud to be helping drive the low carbon agenda forward in partnership with SHIFT and Sustainable Homes.

Andrew Eagles, Managing Director of Sustainable Homes also welcomed the sponsorship, saying: “We are delighted to welcome Mears to SHIFT. They are acting to reduce the environmental impacts both from homes and their own operations.  Mears’ activity in this area already demonstrates their innovative approach to leadership within the Social Housing space and we are delighted that their work with SHIFT will now further enhance that.”

Mears places significant emphasis on environmental improvement. This commitment was strengthened in September 2010 when Mears announced that it had entered into a Strategic Partnership with British Gas developed to help local authorities improve the sustainability of social housing. The partnership targets funding opportunities under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) and the Community Energy Savings Programme (CESP) within its existing and future Social Housing client base, enabling Social Housing Landlords to leverage more value from their capital budgets.

As well as promoting greener actions within the workplace through their ‘Getting Greener’ Campaign, Mears is has also recently completed the first of a series of "Our Homes, Our Communities and Our Planet" road shows featuring practical ways to be more environmentally aware and lead more sustainable lifestyles.

SHIFT is the comprehensive environmental benchmark for affordable housing providers. The SHIFT Index is administrated by Sustainable Homes. Members are accredited on a scale of Commended to Platinum. SHIFT was launched in 2008 with 16 members.   

Notes:

The SHIFT Index was established with the support of the Homes and Communities Agency, Tenant Services Authority, UK Green Building Council, WWF UK and the Greater London Authority. These organisations continue to support and contribute to the development of the Index.

Mears Group is the one of the UK’s largest providers of social care and social housing repair and maintenance solutions. We employ 12,000 people across the UK, look after 500,000 social homes and work with 77 Local Authorities and 18 PCT's. We have 80 care branches, providing 160,000 hours of domiciliary care per week to 20,000 care users.

Sustainable Homes acts as the secretariat for the SHIFT Index and is the leading provider of sustainable housing training and consultancy in the UK. For more information on these and other services please see www.sustainablehomes.co.uk

For more information about SHIFT please contact  

Andrew Eagles
Managing Director
Sustainable Homes
andrew@sustainablehomes.co.uk
0208 973 0420

For further information on Mears or their sponsorship of SHIFT, please contact

Ray Blundell, Group Sales Leader
Mears Group Plc
ray.blundell@mearsgroup.co.uk
07836326512